‘Never been done': Why Republicans might approve a budget whose numbers don't match up

Yahoo

30-03-2025

President Donald Trump wants action now, unity later, on his legislative agenda. The result is a budget with numbers that don't match up.
Republican leaders are expected to embrace a novel strategy as they seek to push forward as soon as this coming week with their partisan package of tax cuts, border security enhancements, military spending and more. Rather than align House and Senate committees behind the same savings targets in the budget framework for that megabill, they want to set different numbers for each chamber.
The split screen could be stark, at least on paper. House committees will be asked to cut at least $2 trillion in spending from safety-net programs, while Senate committees might be directed to find a minimum of a few billion dollars in savings. It's possible to write a final package that can bridge the difference, but it's likely to be politically tricky — requiring trust between GOP lawmakers in the two chambers after months of cross-Capitol competition, along with substantial pressure from Trump.
Bill Hoagland, a former longtime top Senate GOP budget aide, said in an interview that the bifurcated approach Republican leaders are pursuing is 'unique' and is 'stretching' the process that has governed budget legislation for 50 years.
'Historically, that's never been done,' he said.
But the approach is seen as necessary if Republicans are going to stay on the ambitious timeline they've set for passing their party-line legislation. Without unifying behind a budget blueprint that can clear both chambers, Republicans won't be able to take advantage of reconciliation, which prevents the minority from halting the process with a filibuster. So threading the needle on the budget is a crucial task.
Here's how it could work: The committee-by-committee targets embedded in the budget resolution are considered floors, not ceilings, for shrinking the federal deficit. Those targets are also enforced differently in each chamber — the House can waive their own committees' instructions with a simple majority, but the Senate will need 60 votes (and hence some Democrats) to allow their panels to depart from the blueprint.
That means the Senate needs much more flexibility at the front end of the process to avoid boxing themselves in and inadvertently disqualifying their own bill down the road. That is leading to the bare-bones instructions Senate GOP leaders are now considering. Notably, Republicans in each chamber need to unite now around overall year-by-year totals in their budget framework for federal revenue and budget deficits over the coming decade.
'The House and Senate have different rules — that matters. So it can be written in a certain way that works for both of us,' said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.). 'That is what we're trying to do.'
The 'what' is complicated enough. The 'why' is even more convoluted — and it's all about the respective chambers' politics.
The House's $2 trillion minimum for spending cuts was driven by the demands of fiscal hawks, who conditioned their votes for their chamber's budget blueprint earlier this month on the promise of seeing extreme spending cuts enacted in a final reconciliation bill. Of that total, $880 billion comes out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which could require lawmakers to make deep cuts to Medicaid.
Many GOP senators — and plenty of House Republicans, too — are wary about cutting too deeply into safety-net programs, and they aren't united internally on where their spending cuts should come from. The upshot is that if Senate Republicans end up approving a budget with far more modest targets than those in the House, the final reconciliation bill won't necessarily have to adhere to the House's $2 trillion overall target.
Bobby Kogan, a former top Senate Democratic budget aide, said the tactic would give GOP lawmakers 'huge flexibility to figure it out later.'
'So the House's version says: You must end up with something big,' Kogan continued. 'And the Senate's says: You can end up with something big. But if we can't figure it out, we could end up with something small.'
That has House conservatives on high alert and warning that the direction in which Senate leadership is headed could result in a budget framework that won't actually guarantee their hard-fought cuts.
Their initial outrage puts into question whether this entire gambit is even viable. Majority Leader Steve Scalise warned this week that a major Senate departure from the House plan could lead to further delays.
"They need to recognize that the House, and a huge block of votes in the House, are committed to making significant cuts,' Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said. 'So if they come back with an anemic construction that doesn't have some level of significant baselines of spending cuts, I don't think it'll pass.'
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) also warned in an interview that if the Senate were to 'fundamentally change our construct' by not matching the minimum $2 trillion in spending cuts, 'it will not be well received.'
The Senate GOP's retort is that their forthcoming retooled budget resolution might lowball the committee-by-committee deficit reduction targets (largely matching an earlier blueprint) but would still allow larger spending cuts in the reconciliation bill itself. The committee instructions, in other words, could guarantee only a few billion dollars in deficit reduction — at least $1 billion per panel — while maintaining an 'aspirational' goal of $2 trillion overall.
The skeptics of that approach aren't only in the House. Some Senate fiscal hawks, including some of leadership's most reliable allies, are warning it could set the GOP up to settle on the lowest common denominator. Some GOP senators want to go higher than $2 trillion in deficit savings, especially if Republicans pursue a $5 trillion debt hike, as they are discussing.
The unspoken assumption of many conservatives is that once a budget with bare-bones Senate instructions is approved, leaders will ultimately settle on a less ambitious package of cuts — relying on Trump, desperate for a big legislative win, to muscle it through. Under pressure to deliver a final product, the House would simply waive its more ambitious budget targets in the rule bringing a final bill to the floor.
'If we're going to get meaningful spending cuts, I don't think we can say 'at least a billion' when we really need them to come up with something substantial,' said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
But Senate Republicans who support this approach argue the budget resolution is just a milestone on the way to the real destination — a final reconciliation bill — and the numbers are largely irrelevant. They're itching to get moving, urging their colleagues and House Republicans to adopt a bifurcated blueprint as the first step, saving all of the policy and political wrangling for later.
'The knife fights will start with the actual bill,' said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). 'And the sooner we get started, the better, as far as I'm concerned.'
Meredith Lee Hill and Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.